Behind his appearance as a fanciful old druid, this son of a military doctor born in 1952 in Dakar (Senegal) is one of the world experts in infectious and tropical diseases, at the head of the Institut hospitalo universitaire Méditerranée Infection, in the second city of France.
And he has fun with those who are struggling to defeat his work. “Little Parisian Marquis,” sweeps with the back of his hand one of the 11 members of the Covid-19 scientific council to the French government.
In late February, via video, he announced the “endgame” against the new coronavirus from Wuhan in China: chloroquine, a common molecule used against malaria, would be the main weapon to annihilate it. Clinical tests in China conducted under the direction of Professor Zhong Nanshan have confirmed previous in vitro tests.
Too easy to be true? Critics are pouring in, notably from FakeMed, a collective of scientists fighting false information in the health field, and professors warning of the undesirable effects of this drug.
“A video accusing me of broadcasting + Fake News + was even seen 450,000 times on Facebook, but it gave me considerable publicity, that they continue to say horrors like that”, he laughed in mid-March .
Of 24 patients treated at IHU Méditerranée Infection with hydroxychloroquine, 75% have a negative viral load after six days, he said. Clearly: the virus is gone, the patient is no longer contagious. In comparison, 90% of patients treated without chloroquine, in Nice and Avignon, would still be contagious after this same period.
But it was the intervention of US President Donald Trump on Thursday that highlighted these promising results, even if the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the federal agency that oversees the marketing of drugs in the United States, then tempered the presidential enthusiasm.
“I don’t play Nostradamus”
“It’s just proof that they are serious people,” said Raoult to the AFP.
Collector of bacteria and viruses – he has more than 3,000 of the most dangerous in the world – in his premises in Marseille, in the heart of the Timone hospital, this father of two, married to a psychiatrist, s was already noticed by his discoveries.
A world specialist in Rickettsiae, these intracellular bacteria at the origin notably of typhus, Didier Raoult also deciphered the genome of the bacterium at the origin of Whipple’s disease, almost a century after the appearance of this pathology.
On his mattresses, in his laboratories, during his Marseilles career, in this city where he arrived at the age of nine with his parents, returning from Africa, he multiplies the finds. Like Mimivirus, this giant virus which he identified in 1992 and will baptize in honor of “Mimi the amoeba”, this hero invented by his father when he told him stories to explain his evolution. Then it is Sputnik that he will spot, thanks to Mimivirus: this dwarf virus is exceptional because virophagous, capable of infecting another virus to thrive.
With his teams, he identifies dozens of new pathogenic bacteria, two of which bear his name today, Raoultella planticola and Rickettsia raoultii.
A pioneer in paleomicrobiology, Didier Raoult was first of all a researcher. But also an industry captain, as when he proposed to the Minister of Health, Jean-François Mattei, in the early 2000s, to create seven “infectious poles”, “Vauban-style fortresses” against infectious diseases.
Ten years later, six IHUs are created across France, each on a different theme: Imagine in Paris, on genetic diseases or Mediterranean Infection, in Marseille, which he has directed since 2011.
Leaving to roam on a merchant marine ship, at 18, Didier Raoult passed his literary bac at 20, as a free candidate before taking up medicine. And to make a name for yourself, through hard work and thundering positions, as when he denounced the ban on the veil at university, in 2016, or when he expressed his doubts in the face of global warming and these mathematical models catastrophists who are only a modern form of “divination”.
“I don’t play Nostradamus, all the forecasts are wrong, you can never do anything but daily adjustment,” he said in late February.
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